Collage on paper
177.8 x 360.7 cm
In Dirty Hands, faces snipped from newspapers are half-completed in graphic lines; the human body appears as broken shards, silhouettes or metonymic parts: teeth, eyes, arms. The preponderance of text in his work demands that Kolk’s work be read, rather than absorbed as a work on this large scale usually is; the act of looking is also one of internal comparison, the revelation of visual rhymes. In Country Road, eyes and lips switch places through visual kinship; the road of the title is driven by cars, trod by horses. Kolk’s work embodies a world where fixed meanings lose their moorings; everything is like something else, and nothing is any one thing at any one time.